Madlib Quotes

My musical influences are from the '50s: Bill Evans, Miles Davis and Ahmad Jamal.

Jazz, and the history of jazz, is the history of America.

There's a plethora of genres that I've been introduced to, but that's only because of the foundation that was laid growing up in New Orleans. I know it's a cliche thing to say, but it's very gumbo-like. You get that here. You can mix well with all different walks of life. That's what New Orleans is. It's like no other place.

I was always very aware of drummers. My oldest brother Henry was a drummer, and he drummed on everything in the house from the kitchen sink to stovepipes. He was the first drummer in the Gil Evans Orchestra, so you've got to know how great he was.

My primary influences were the best jazz players from the 50's and 60's and later some of the pop people from the same time period along with the better of the well known blues musicians.

New Orleans is like a big musical gumbo. The sound I have is from being in the city my whole life.

My dad loved black singers. So listening to New Orleans music, eventually I wanted to play an instrument.

My mother says I was two-and-a-half when I started playing. My father was a minister, and when he went to church in the morning, she would put on Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and Cole Porter records. I'd crawl up on the piano stool, sit on a phone book and play.

The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I'm doin' now, man, for more years than I know. I got it from them.

For years, Jazz At The Philharmonic albums were the only ones of their kind.

My father was a jazz tenor sax player. He played in a lot of big bands. So I had that sound around me all the time. The first record that really caught my ear was Clifford Brown's 'Brownie Eyes.' I grew up listening to John Coltrane and Illinois Jacquet. This is where I come from... I love improvisational music.

I grew up with all these old jazz guys in the '70s in L.A., and they grew up idolizing Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lester Young - all of these incredible musicians.

I grew up with singers. My father's mother sang opera. My dad was a big band singer. I can't remember a time there wasn't music in the house, so I grew up listening to great songwriters - George Gershwin, Cole Porter - and my grandma was playing opera for me before I was 3.

I had the fortunate experience to play with people from different schools of music. Sam Rivers is from the fundamentalist school of music.

So I was always around music and my dad was in his own way a progressive jazzer, a big band jazzer guy.

When I was a kid, I always looked up to people like B.B. King and Ray Charles.

The jazz boom was goin' on then so there was a lot happenin' in New York at that time.

The first records I heard were from Dizzy Gillespie and people like that.

As a kid, I used to go see all the jazz players, Oscar Peterson, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespe.

I've been listening to jazzmen, especially saxophonists, since the time of the early Count Basie records, which featured Lester Young. Pres was my first real influence, but the first horn I got was an alto, not a tenor.

I respected Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. Those were my heroes, and they were 10 years older than I was.

I grew up in the Great Depression, and the jazz artists and Dixieland musicians were at the core of our communications and enjoyment. They were not passing fancies. They are something that is, and will be, listened to again and again. I have a space of reverence for some of those old jazz stars such as Sydney Bechet and Louis Armstrong.

I grew up listening to Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell, guys with blues backgrounds.

Growing up on Franklin Road in Nashville, I had everyone from Johnny Cash to Fats Domino swinging by my house to talk with my mom about my dad. So I had some pretty diverse influences, and I think that shows in my music.

New Yorkers know how to borrow wildly. You know, Louis Armstrong was not a New York musician. He went from New Orleans to Chicago to New York, and when he arrived here, he taught those New Yorkers. New York needs that infusion.